Bill seeks pay raise for tipped workers
Bill seeks pay raise for tipped workers
Send a link to a friend
[February 15, 2022]
By BETH HUNDSDORFER
Capitol News Illinois
bhundsdorfer@capitolnewsillinois.com
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2022/Feb/15/images/ads/current/country_bauer_bcv_011719.png)
A bill in the Illinois House would do away
with the sub-minimum wage paid to waitresses, bartenders and other
tipped service workers.
Rep. Camille Lilly, D-Chicago, introduced House Bill 5139 last month. If
the bill becomes law, workers who supplement their wages with tips will
receive the state’s minimum wage starting on Jan. 1, 2025, in addition
to their tips.
Its passage may be a tall order, however, as the Illinois Restaurant
Association successfully lobbied when lawmakers overhauled the minimum
wage schedule in 2019 to allow businesses to continue to pay less than
minimum wage to employees who earn tips.
Lilly’s bill has currently not received a full committee assignment and
has no cosponsors.
In 2019, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed legislation into law providing
a path to increase Illinois' minimum wage rate to $15 per hour and $9
for tipped workers by 2025. Servers and bartenders who receive tips are
currently subject to a $7.20 an hour minimum wage.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2022/Feb/15/images/ads/current/graue_21CAMARO_100421.png)
At a bill signing for that 2019 law, Sam Toia, president of the
Restaurant Association, appeared alongside Pritzker and praised the law
for maintaining the credit which allows employers to pay tipped workers
60 percent of the minimum wage if tips make up the other 40 percent.
The IRA did not respond to a request for comment as of this publication.
But Lilly, in a news conference Monday, noted that Valentine’s Day is
the highest grossing day of the year for restaurants, making the
announcement of the effort to eliminate the sub-minimum wage in Illinois
poetic.
“This work comes from the heart,” Lilly said during a Monday news
conference. “This is the beginning of addressing poverty for each and
every worker across the state of Illinois.”
“Two years ago, we raised the minimum wage, but we left tip workers
out,” Lilly said. “This is a way to address that.”
Since 2020, more than a million workers have left the hospitality
industry nationwide. In Illinois, about 90,000 workers have left the
industry since 2020, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The bureau reported that a record 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs
in November, but the quit rate in the hospitality and leisure industry
was 6.4 percent – more than double the average of all the combined
industries.
[to top of second column]
|
![](../images/021522PIX/news_x45.jpg)
Rep. Camille Lilly, D-Chicago, speaks at a news
conference in Springfield last year. She's advocating for a bill
this General Assembly that would require businesses to pay tipped
workers the standard minimum wage. (Capitol News Illinois file
photo)
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2022/Feb/15/images/ads/current/graue_preowned_021422.png)
The virtual news conference on Monday was hosted by the organization One
Fair Wage, based in New York.
Attendees said the hot job market led many in the hospitality industry
to find higher paying jobs in other sectors.
The added challenges for restaurant workers included enforcing COVID-19
mandates, as well as exposing themselves to the virus by those who
refused to comply with mitigation efforts. Also, sexual harassment is
often tolerated because waitresses and bartenders depend on tips to
supplement their hourly income.
In 2019, women made up 51 percent of workforce in the hospitality
industry.
Tabina Gibson, of Chicago, worked in the hospitality industry for 20
years. Gibson, who attended the news conference with Lilly, is the
mother of five and grandmother to two.
When the pandemic hit and she was laid off, she said she found she made
too little in wages to collect unemployment. She used a grant and
started a small business with her daughter selling lip gloss and other
personal care items.
Gibson isn’t alone. In March 2020, one in four people in Illinois who
lost their jobs was in the restaurant industry, but two-thirds of
restaurant workers reported they couldn’t access unemployment benefits
because their subminimum wage was too low to qualify for benefits.
Victor Love owns Josephine’s Southern Cooking in Chicago. He said he has
challenges. His restaurant survived the pandemic and the violence that
occurs in the neighborhood. Despite the challenges, Love said he
supports higher wages for his employees.
One of his employees has worked for his restaurant for 30 years, Love
noted. That kind of loyalty, Love said, provides stability.
“Give and it shall be given back to you,” he said.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2022/Feb/15/images/ads/current/LPL_small%201.gif)
Love’s daughter, Grace, is a waitress at her father’s restaurant. She
currently gets paid $9 an hour plus tips.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering
state government and distributed to more than 400 newspapers statewide.
It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert
R. McCormick Foundation. |